Professor Kathleen Lynch:

The thing was that women did the work for nothing. They did it without pay and in conditions that were invisible. The invisiblisation of care became very evident in the pandemic but it remains a problem for precisely the reasons mentioned. People are at home every day. I should say that I have been a family carer for the last eight years so I am very familiar with this both in theory and in practice. Mostly, a person cannot get out of the house; he or she is there and tied to care. A person cannot bring his or her granny downtown in a wheelchair to make a protest if she is in a bed. I think that is a fundamental problem.

Our public services are also a problem, however. Most of our public services are care services. If we think about education, educarein Latin means "to nurture". Healthcare is about care and welfare is about care. I will go back to the Constitution, which, of course, I wrote about it in 1996 in the report of the first Constitution Review Group. I fundamentally believe care should be a core principle that is supported in the Constitution. Without it, we cannot have a caring democracy. I am not necessarily saying the State should be intervening in everything but it should facilitating and enabling; it should not be reducing. There is a danger, which I only mentioned in passing but which is huge in the literature, once we start to financialise care, as opposed to just making it commercial. I mentioned in my presentation, for example, the Barchester Corporation, which is a big commercial care provider in the UK. It has 12,000 beds and 200 nursing homes. It withdraws money from the sector. It makes much money from the many companies it has in the care sector. This is just an example. Therefore, if we are sending people out to make profit, we cannot treat them the same way because the focus is on efficiency. It is cutting time and cutting corners and not being available and, as Family Carers Ireland said, people do not get contracts. Therefore, if somebody is employed for four different hours in four different places then it is not worth his or her while to work because he or she has no security. That is because we have not had a care-led narrative or a feminist narrative at the heart of the State.

Care makes us up as human beings. None of us will live unless we are loved or cared for and we certainly will not live well. Care takes time and it is expensive but what happens if we do not do it? I would love to see in some future committee an analysis of the whole relationship between the quality of care people have, especially young people, and their emotional mental health. There are consequences if we do not take care of people. Nurturing time is long time; it is not fast food and it is not fast care. That must be provided and supported by the Exchequer.

Senator Warfield is right to ask those questions. We have moved away from the idea of a caring society to one that is driven by profiteering and even personal gain and careerism. It is about always about profit; it is about career and power. We must look back and refine that, and rethink not only the care services but the other, what I would call public, services, which are fundamentally about caring.

I agree with the Senator about childcare. Those issues must be properly measured in any future census data. A big national issue, though, is how we collect data because much of our data are often not available for analysis in a manner that is accessible and available to people who might use them not just for research but for policy purposes.